Artificial intelligence was the focus on Wednesday when tech giants Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta (META) kicked off the first🐲 round of Big Tech earnings of 2025.

Analysts peppered executives with questions about their AI investments, how much AI is contributing to revenue, and their thoughts on Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which shook up Wall Street earlie༒r this week with its super-efficie🗹nt AI model.

AI Business Is Booming

Executives were eager to show investors that artificial intelligence is contributing to their bottom lines.

Meta CFO Susan Li said Meta AI reached 700 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter while the company’s AI-powered Advantage+ marketing service grew 70%. Meta's quarterly revenue and earnings both 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:surpassed analysts' expectations.

Microsoft’s fiscal second-quarter cloud revenue 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:fell🦹 slightly short of expectations, but CEO Satya Nadella noted the company’s AI revenue run rate hit $13 billion in the quarter, well above the $10 billion mark he forecast in October.

IBM (IBM) CEO Arvind Krishna said the company 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:booked nearly $2 billion of AI business in the final quarter of 2024; that accounts for about 40% of the $5 billion booked since inception. 

Tech Titans Are Committed to Their AI Spending

Executives from Microsoft and Meta stood by their pl﷽ans to spend tens of billions of dollars this ye💫ar on AI infrastructure.

“We 𒁏expect to continue investing against strong demand signals,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said of its capital expenditures plan on the company’s earnings call. “However, the gr🉐owth rate will be lower than FY2025.” 

Microsoft forecast spending $80 billion on infrastructure in its 2025 fiscal year. So far, two quarters in, the company has spent $30.7 billion, a 56% increase from a year ago. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also defended his company’s massive AI investments, which could total 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:$65 billionꦫ this year. “I continue🥀 to think that investing very heavily in CapEx and infra is going to be a strategic advantage over time,” he told analysts on Wednesday evening. 

Big tech’s AI spending was already a source of anxiety on Wall Street, where for half a year questions have swirled about whether demand will match the scale of inf🐟rastructure investments. Those doubts were amplified this week when markets took notice o❀f DeepSeek, whose open-source AI model reportedly performs as well as leading U.S. models and runs at a fraction of the cost. 

Heading into Wednesday’s earnings reports, 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:analysts doubted that hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon (AMZN) would change their investment outlooks. DeepSeek’s ef♊ficiencies could fuel the development of AI applications and stoke demand further, giving cloud providers even more reason to continue aggressively adding computing capacity. 

Silicon Valley Impress🐬ed by DeepSeek, Not Scared

Markets may have been shaken by DeepSeek, but tec🔜h executives weren’t. 

“In some sense, what's happening with AI is no different than what was happening with the regular compute cycle,” said Microsoft's Nadella of DeepSeek’s efficiency. “We ourselves have been seeing significant efficiency gains in both training and inference for years now.” 

Nadella admitted that DeepSeek, whose model rivals the capabilities of Microsoft-backed OpenAI, “has had some real innovations” that he said should benefit his firm. “When token prices fall, inference computing prices fall. That means people can consume more, and there'll be more apps written” that are supported by Microsoft’s infrastructure and services. 

Zuckerberg echoed Nadella’s praise for DeepSeek, saying🙈 he and his team were still digesting “a number of novel 🅰things that they did” that “we will hope to implement in our systems.”

Zuckerberg added that 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:DeepSeek’s success vindicated Meta’s decision to make its large language model, Llama, open-source. DeepSeek was evidence, he said, that “there's going to be an open source standard globally. And I think for our kind of own national advantage, it's important that it's an Amer🍰ican standard.”

In another sign of nearly unflappable confidence in the future of America's AI leaders, Japanese tech investor Softbank is reportedly in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI, which would make it the ChatGPT-maker's largest investor. That would reportedly be on top of the $15 billion SoftBank already committed to 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:spend on a joint venture with OpenAI and Oracle (ORCL), announced last week.

Update—January 30, 2025: This article has been updated with information regarding SoftBank's potential investment in OpenAI.